


My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun

by neverfaraway



Category: Bill (2015)
Genre: Canon Trans Character, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:48:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27124063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: Bill has been writing sonnets in his spare time. Gabriel is not best pleased.
Relationships: William Shakespeare/Gabriel Montoya
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: this is a very self-indulgent, pretentious bit of flash fic, enter at your own risk.
> 
> Having just re-watched ‘Bill’, I was delighted all over again by Gabriel, and wanted to write a bit (a very small bit) of the rest of her story. So, if you accept (which lots of people don’t) the theory that Shakespeare never intended his sonnets to be published, and that the ‘youth’ is the Earl of Southampton (whose hair is every bit as splendid in his portraits as it was in the film)… then I give you: Bill writing his second-most-famous sonnet about Gabriel. 
> 
> CW: gratuitous discussion of pricks of a variety of meanings; a trans character is concerned about how their partner describes their physical appearance.

INTERIOR. _The Curtain theatre, Shoreditch, where we find our hero, late overseeing rehearsal of his play, titled_ Much Ado About Nothing _, and now retired behind the stage to pick and poke, as is his wont, at the lines his players are to speak before the Queen on their next appointment at Richmond Palace. He is a man of some wealth, from the gilding on his jerkin. Were we to see him at his handsome house on Bishopsgate, we would know him as a man of consequence; a playwright of renown._

_Bill (for that the name given to him by his friends) is reading a sheaf of papers; re-writes, presumably, of his play. The area behind the stage is deserted, for the players have departed for the alehouse._

_Enter a woman, whose black hair is loose about her shoulders beneath a cap of black corded velvet. She is dressed in a peculiar manner, her gown and the style of her cap betraying her Iberian origins. She is carrying a bundle of fabric: costumes, discarded by the players, and now in need of alteration before the performance before the Queen._

Bill: Have you finished the breeches? I swear, if Kempe eats more pies, he will burst them again in the midst of listing the charges, and though I wrote Dogberry for a fool, I did not mean him to become a jester. I am not made of money for hosing silk, either.

Gabriel: The breeches will be mended, soon enough.

_Bill glances from his papers. It seems Gabriel is attempting to ignore him._

Bill: Come, sweetness. What have I done to warrant such frostiness?

Gabriel: _[Picking stitches from Mr. Burbage’s tunic.]_ You have pricked me, Master Shakespeare.

Bill: When you say I have pricked you...?

Gabriel: You mean, do I refer to the pricking of my feelings, or that by virtue of owning my appearance too honestly you have pricked me by implication?

Bill: Do I?

Gabriel: _[She abandons the tunic.]_ The answer is both, and therefore it is my honour that is pricked.

Bill: My honey, if you will not tell me how I have so offended thee, I cannot make ready my apology.

Gabriel: Your crime is that you are an unthinking swine, sometimes, Bill Shakespeare.

Bill: Granted. But tell me, what is my crime in this instance, that I must be so condemned? A fiend and a bugger I may be, but swine I feel is a little too far.

Gabriel: _[She brandishes a slip of paper, much scored with ink and the evidence of extensive corrections.]_ I found this, among your clothes as I picked them apart for the re-stitching. Your ode to your mistress, whose eyes are nothing like the sun.

Bill: Ah. And what did you think of it?

Gabriel: I could run you through for it. Had I my sword at hand, I just might.

Bill: But… why? I wrote it for you.

Gabriel: Let me see… ‘If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.’

Bill: Well, your hair is black.

Gabriel: And my poor breasts, such as they are, dun.

Bill: _[He plucks the paper from her fingers and reads it swiftly.]_ But, see - it isn’t finished yet!

Gabriel: You will have to do better than that.

Bill: No, honestly! Look - look, I have only the quatrains. I was thinking up the couplet, I just hadn’t committed it to paper - come to think of it, I must have left it in Don Pedro’s doublet, and then forgotten all about finishing it. See, now. _[He hurries to the lectern and seizes a quill, pausing only for a moment before he scribbles another number of lines.]_ There: read it!

Gabriel: 'And yet, by heaven, I think my love as fair, As any she belied with false compare.’ Madre de Dios. Do you think I was born yesterday?

Bill: It’s true! That is what I had intended. You know the point of these verses is to turn them on their head with the final couplet. Am I to be punished for owning you are no goddess, but flesh and blood, and that I worship you for it? 

_Gabriel reads the poem a second time._

Gabriel: I have been wondering, Bill, about returning to Spain.

Bill: To Spain? But King Philip would have you executed! You could not live as freely there, as you do here.

Gabriel: Perhaps I could live exactly as I do, here. I have skills as a seamstress; a costumier. And you forget I am a trained assassin.

Bill: Believe me, I do not. But, I thought you were happy here. 

Gabriel: Whatever is between us-

Bill: Whatever? Gabriel, you know I love you.

Gabriel: You go back to Stratford when it please you, and I have no quarrel with it; you have Anne, and the children, and she makes no quarrel with me, and I have no quarrel with that, either; when you return to London, here I reside. I have everything I have ever desired. I am satisfied with my lot.

Bill: Say not satisfied. Say happy. Say your life here brings you joy.

Gabriel: Aye, it does; you know it.

Bill: Then say happy.

Gabriel: Aye, I am happy. I live as I feel I must; I have work that pleases me. And so, I have no need of your poems. I know what I am, and I would have you refrain from making me a public spectacle.

Bill: A spectacle? Never. Would you believe I did it to make you happy? To see you smile?

Gabriel: Then you have misjudged me. I am not the Earl of Southampton, in need of flattery to get his prick up. You write that he is golden, all light, and therefore I must be the gloom, I suppose.

Bill: Never. You are a jewel.

Gabriel: A dun-coloured jewel. A bearded jewel.

Bill: A jewel nonetheless. Surely my verse shows it; I love you not in spite of what you are, but because of it. I am not blind, but I am entirely bewitched. Besides - in my poems, I have him be false. Bright, perhaps, but fickle as the weather in April.

Gabriel: And I, in my constancy, am therefore to be flattered that I am called reeking?

Bill: My honey, I was in need of a rhyme. To me, your breath is sweetness itself. Come, let me drink of it again, and we will have no more of going back to Spain.

_He draws her into a kiss; she goes willingly, for since he first kissed her over beer and hot cakes in the rooms they rented above the Quill and Rapier, she has never been able to resist him. Those first months at the Quill had passed as in a dream: she had donned a more convincing wig and Bill had introduced her to his new friends as a lady of Spain, as wicked with a needle as with a sword, and it had been assumed that they roomed together as man and mistress, a notion Bill had done nothing to dispel. It had not yet been quite true._

_At the Curtain, some time later, after Bill has attempted to prove his ardour and the subject of pricks has arisen a second time, to a more satisfying end, they share a pipe, lying close together on a bed of Master Kempe’s unfortunate breeches._

Bill: _[He hands her the pipe.]_ That verse was not meant for anyone’s eyes but mine, you know. I promise you, whatever shame you imagine I have brought upon you, is my own shame alone.

Gabriel: I do not care about shame. Shame for being your mistress matters not a fig to me; shame for being a Spaniard, I will endure; but shame for living as I am, as I must, I cannot bear, not from you.

Bill: I understand; you never shall again.

Gabriel: An end to the poems, then?

Bill: Never. That would be like asking me to view the sunrise and fail to describe, with my meagre words, its timeless beauty.

Gabriel: You really are crazy in the coconut.

Bill: Fair. Alright, I’ll stay my hand on the poetry; I may write, but it will not be about you. I will invent some fantastical woman, another dark lady, some tormentress of my desires, and paint the world a picture of perfidious love. But you must know that you are rare, to me, and precious as any jewel.

Gabriel: _[Pleased, despite herself, as a lover often is.]_ You are a flatterer.

Bill: _[In earnest, kissing her soft cheek.]_ You are wrong; about some few things, I never lie.


End file.
